My suspicion is that the vast majority of altcoins are made by a few people.
Create coin - most work already done by past coins.
Announce - you are guaranteed to have a lot because you will be in on early mining (and may have pre-mined)
Sell - sell coins to people with gambling addictions who want to get in on this new coin while it is young.
Leave project and start another coin. Maybe even bad-mouth last coin so that people you got into that coin are more likely to invest in your new coin.
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Remember the Internet is full of crooks of liars
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I would suggest looking at coins that have been around for a year with mostly the same dev team, and a dev team that seems to know what they are doing and has brought things new to the coin that were not in what they forked.
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Don't believe the PoS hype. It may have value but that has yet to be demonstrated. The opposite however has been demonstrated, at least one coin had to reverse the blockchain because PoS gave a coin thief too much control.
But PoS sounds like a good idea to many even though its worth over PoW has not been real-world demonstrated, so it is used to hype coins because it is easy to make it sound like something awesome, and that is a sign that the coin may in fact be created by someone who planned to dump from the start after a pump.
No alt-coin with PoS has yet reached enough critical mass to determine if PoS is really beneficial to the operation of the coin.
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For me, there are two alt-coins I have interest in -
namecoin
quarkcoin
Look at them and what they have to offer yourself, because my opinion of them obviously will be biased.
Though I currently very rarely use namecoin (I have some major plans though - the decentralized key=>value store is what makes it worth it to me).
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If you see alt-coins as play money and not investment, then you can have fun with almost any coin.
That's what a lot of reddit users saw with dogecoin - it was a joke and a fun one for play. Those getting burned are those that saw it as investment.
But if you look at them as play money until they have actually demonstrated real-world utility you can have fun with just about any of them.